India to surpass U.S. in DTH sector by end of 2012

As per the latest MPA reports, India's fast growing, six-player DTH sector is expected to overtake the U.S. next year as the largest in the world, with an active subscriber base of close to 42 million. The local cable & satellite advertising market is expected to surpass China by 2017, to lead the APAC region with $5.6 billion in net revenues.

With the DTH market on an upswing in India, Jayant Changrani, Country Head and GM, NDS India, talks about this booming market, opportunities, challenges and NDS’ roadmap for future. NDS supplies open end-to-end digital technology and services to digital pay TV platform operators and content providers.

How is the current market landscape?

India remains Asia's largest pay-TV market opportunity in which revenue, cost and capital expenditures are growing at a phenomenal rate due to various dynamics, including macro growth, competition and digitization. The active DTH subscriber base is predicted to grow from 23 million in 2010 to 64 million by 2015 and 83 million by 2020, implying a 44 percent share of the overall market by 2020. The main challenges are transponder capacity, high churn, subscriber acquisition costs and limited pricing power due to intense competition and regulations that mean that content has to be available to all operators on a non-exclusive basis. However, with better cost control and scale of operations, we do believe that some of the DTH players will start generating free cash flows by 2015. Also, the recent approval of Ministry of Information & Broadcasting on TRAI’s recommendation to increase the FDI from 49 percent to 74 percent for the DTH sector will further strengthen their expansion plans and resolve a lot of funding issues.